In recent years, physically based effects have become more and more popular in computer games. Features that used to be hand-animated are now driven by simulators. Some examples include rigid bodies and particles. However, in most cases, bodies of water such as rivers, lakes or oceans are still animated using procedural approaches.
For example, this often is a result of the large simulation domain in these scenarios [e.g. to get details on the surface of a lake using a full three-dimensional (3D) fluid simulation would generally require millions of grid cells if a Eulerian technique is used or millions of particles if a smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) approach is used]. For real-time applications, such as computer games, the problem may be reduced from 3D to 2D by treating the body of water as a two-dimensional (2D) height field. Unfortunately, while this may reduce simulation time substantially, phenomena like waterfalls or overturning waves cannot be represented by the 2D height field.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.